NEW DELHI: The subscriber base of India’s leading telecom operator Bharti Airtel, No. 2 Vodafone India and third ranked Idea Cellular expanded 12% during the second half of 2016-17, despite new entrant Reliance Jio Infocomm coming up with free voice and data offers after its commercial launch in September 2016, brokerage CLSA said.

“Despite the new entrant’s (Jio) 93 million additions, top three incumbents have still reported a 12% year-on-year rise in subscriber additions to 39 million during the second-half of the 2017 fiscal,” the Hong Kong-based brokerage said in a report.

Jio has more than 109 million users at present.

Since Jio’s commercial foray on September 5, 2016, with two back-to-back promotional offers stretching till March 31 this year, the incumbent telcos have been competing hard through their own offers to retain and attract subscribers.

Smaller telcos together lost 15 million customers, though, CLSA said. The Tata group’s Tata Teleservices’ subscriber erosion was the highest among operators, declining 8 million, which could be due to a higher share of dongle users who might have shifted to Jio’s services.

CLSA also said that overall mobile subscriber additions by service providers in the second half of the fiscal jumped more than threefold to 116 million from 37 million a year ago, driven by Jio’s addition of 93 million customers due to free services.

The high additions by the top three players as well as Jio underline the surge of multi-SIM usages, the brokerage said.

“This rise has also been exacerbated due to operators’ reluctance to disconnect inactive/dormant subscribers. Consequently, the share of inactive subscribers for the industry has risen from 9.6% in September to 12.4% in December (last available data),” CLSA said.

The circle-wise breakup of Jio’s subscriber base revealed that the services of Mumbai-based new entrant have been primarily used in urban markets.

“As on March-17, Jio’s overall subscriber market share stood at 9%. While its share in metros has reached 14%, its share in B & C-circles was lower at 7-8%. The rural-urban split of Jio’s subscriber base also shows that rural subscribers formed 6% of its subscriber base in December (last available data),” CLSA said.

The brokerage said that the high adoption of Jio’s services in urban areas primarily reflects higher 4G device penetration in these markets.